Japan: Hygiene & Household Products

Okay, Indigirl – you asked for it, you got it. Let’s take an in-depth look into the fascinating world of Japanese hygiene and household products…

I’m sure I looked like the Biggest Douche in the Universe, moving slowly and methodically through the aisles of Himeji’s SuperDrug, camera poised, giggling softly to myself from time to time, snapping pictures of hair dye packets, soap, maxi pads and constipation drugs. I kept imagining what I would think if I was trying to buy some toothpaste at my local Shoppers Drug Mart at Yonge & Charles in Toronto, and some solitary female Japanese tourist was doing the same thing. I couldn’t picture it; the scenario seemed unlikely.

Beauty and Medicinal Products

There are always differences in how marketing is targeted at various cultures, especially when the product in question is something localized, like food. But hygiene products seem as though they should be universal, given that there are common physical needs we all share. Everyone has teeth that need brushing and flossing, skin that needs washing and moisturizing, armpits and feet that need deodorizing. If you prick us, do we not buy band-aids?

Still, I’ve found that the Asian fascination with English words makes it alluring to use them as a brand name or a cool addition to packaging, more to make the product look fancy than to actually describe it in an informative way. This whimsical use of my language makes shopping for even the most commonplace and mundane bathroom items an amusing exercise.

Examples:

• * Cow beauty soap
• * Flying Pig feminine hygiene products – “Honey, I have my period. Can you get me some maxi pads from the drug store?”, “When pigs fly!” …and so, a marketing idea was born.
• * Sky Hat toilet paper – featuring the following deep thought printed below the pink hat logo: “The form which gives satisfaction varies according to people. However, the common element is a satisfied feeling that high standards can produce.” (Whatever they paid their translator, I think they should ask for a refund.)
• * Sexiest Musk Fantasy moisturizer – so wanted to export this, but feared the consequences of an accidental in-flight explosion might mean burning all my luggage, and possibly all the other passenger’s luggage as well, to get rid of the smell. Like Sex Panther from Anchorman.
• * Hot Curvy OilGel – no clue how this works, where it should be applied, or what sort of toxic ingredients are inside, but I was nearly compelled to purchase it for the semi-pornographic “this is what you will look like if you use our product” image on the cover.

Some of the medicinal products were equally amusing. Lots of patches. Eye patches. Weight loss patches for girls. Nipple patches, called Nippless, presumably to prevent yourself from becoming “nipple-less” due to friction-based sports injuries. And almost a whole aisle of pore-cleaning patches, aka Biore strips. There is some serious pore cleanliness obsession happening in Japan, much like skin whitening was the obsession in Hong Kong. The Biore packages in Japan are nasty, as they have ultra-magnified close-ups of the forest of pore dirt that results from use. As with Pocky, there’s a separate area for Men’s Biore (because dudes get blocked pores, too). And when Biore strips fail, there’s always pore vacuumer, featuring silhouettes of women holding actual vacuum cleaners on the packaging: this is the Godzilla of pore cleaning products.

I also really enjoyed the use of hand-drawn illustrations rather than photographs to sell everything from bath salts to hair dye. The Manga characters advertising colours on Beauteen hair dye were only beaten out by the Blythe dolls showing the sort of blonde you can achieve with Fresh Light hair bleach. I’m sure my illustrator friends in North America and Europe are kicking themselves at missing out on the opportunity to cash in on the lucrative Asian pharmaceutical packaging market.

Cleaning Products and Insecticides

I loved the faces on all the scrubbing sponges for sale in the store. Some were flexing illustrated muscles, many looked like Mr. Hankey. All had very clear descriptions of precisely what they were to be used for: “Cleans lime in the toilet tank disposable type,” or “Cleans mold in the bathroom only with water.”

I don’t know what the story is with Japanese vermin and insects – I haven’t seen many bugs or rodents at all since arriving 2 weeks ago – but the battalion of repellents, poisons and toxic sprays at the drug store paint a horrifying picture. Millipedes. Centipedes. Megapedes. Wasps. Giant ants. On one alarmingly yellow can, talking ants (the ant is talking to one of its hill-mates, with a speech bubble above its head saying “Oh! My God!”). Maybe they only emerge in summer, but I’m sure as heck not sticking around to find out.

Hiroshima: Paper Cranes & Okonomiyaki

Hiroshima was not what I expected. I don’t know what I thought I’d find there, but I suppose I thought there would be more physical evidence of the devastation of the A-bomb, even though it was half a century ago, outside of the scope of my lifetime. Instead, the town was a bustling metropolis of tall buildings, streets in good repair and people bustling to and fro, going about their daily lives.

Locals were proudly cheering on their local baseball team – the Hiroshima Carp – who are featured on the city’s sewer grates (imagine if Toronto’s sewer grates had the Maple Leafs or Raptors logos on them?!?!) even though the team lost to the Osaka Tigers yesterday in what looked to me to be a big game. There were a large number of signs and t-shirts saying “Let Peace Prevail On Earth”, indicating the city’s vigorously anti-nuclear stance, but other than that it could have been any other medium-sized Japanese city.

I did very little exploration in the town, just walked and walked, from my (excellent) room at Hana Hostel near the train station, across the river, into the downtown and then out the other side and into the Peace Park, where I cried at the sight of the Atomic Dome and the Children’s Memorial and the thousands and thousands of paper cranes. I was quite surprised at how tall the trees across from the Peace Park were; they looked more than 50 years old and healthy, but perhaps being at the epicenter of the blast meant they were spared incineration, like the dome.

On a lighter note, I also sampled the local cuisine. On my way back from the emotional excesses of the Peace Park and memorials, I avoided the drinking quarter, amusingly marked on the map as being “A bit of a dodgy area“, and paused at a store simply named Okonomi Yaki, after the food it serves (like naming a pancake shop “Pancakes”) and went inside for supper.

I was given a selection of crazy filling options for my Japanese pancake, but chose the simplest one to see what the dish was like in its basic form. My Hiroshima okonomiyaki had a crepe-thin tortilla-esque base made of flour, then a filling of shredded cabbage, fatty bacon and skinny soba noodles (making it a “modern” yaki), then a fried egg as the topping. I passed on the local fillings which included octopus, squid and shrimp.

You can watch the video of it being grilled below. My favourite thing was watching the whole process happen right in front of me, with scientific precision, and eating it straight off the grill using a combination of a metal spatula and hachi (chopsticks). My least favourite thing was the brown sauce on top; it had an odd, sour-sweet flavour that my palate just couldn’t warm to. With a tad more tang it would have been HP Fruity sauce and the dish would have been yumtastic, but it was way too sugary for my taste buds.